The world won’t turn out exactly how we wish it would.
The world is not as we would wish it to be.
There is no tantrum quite so acute for my three-year-old daughter, Leah, no moment so tragic, as when things don’t go exactly as she wanted them to go.
The light switch switched by someone else. The peanut butter spread wrongly. The necessity of a cream to be applied. The end of a playtime. Daddy approaching her instead of mummy. Occasionally (very occasionally) vice versa.
It is, for her, heartbreaking, on some level, when it turns out the world does not go exactly how she wants it.
And as I reported this to my biographical counsellor, she pointed out… well, that is quite a sensible view.
It is frustrating, infuriating, stressful and, indeed, heartbreaking, that the world does not go exactly as we would wish it.
That, in its essence perhaps, is the centre of grief.
I was reflecting on grief this week, listening back to my interview with Kim Morgan - a colossus in the UK coaching industry - from several years ago in preparation for speaking to her again. In that conversation, she reflects on what she discovered about grief as she dove into learning about it in the aftermath of her daughter’s sudden death.
Memorably, she describes grief as like glitter. You think it’s all gone, and then discover it on your cheek one day, still there, somehow, long after you thought it would be gone.
A reminder that the world didn’t unfold as you expected. Didn’t unfold as you wanted it to.
That, perhaps, someone will never, never be there again.
And, Morgan explains, what matters is not the scale of the tragedy, but the scale of its effect.
Grief can show up in any moment, with surprising power, when our expectations for the future are destroyed.
A relationship breaking down. A job lost. A dream being brought to a close.
Being humans in the UK in 2023, of course, we like to intellectualise around this and pretend, perhaps that this is over sooner than we think it is.
Or talk ourselves out of it.
But the feelings come back.
The frustration, fury, anxiety, stress at other things that don’t go our way.
The pity we feel for ourselves as we see that really everything that we want can be taken away by disease, or cruelty from another, or chance.
The seeming pointlessness, perhaps, of everything, in that knowledge.
What point in thinking about the future if that future I imagined is denied me?
What point in imagining a future, when that one will probably be denied me, too?
That then, is the incredible mechanism that millions of years of evolution has developed to support our survival. Somehow.
Although I’ve found it doesn’t seem to help that much for someone to tell you that the grief is serving a purpose when I’m in the middle of the maelstrom.
I find myself, in the face of these challenges of this life, often remembering Chris Martin who, in a moment of youthful wisdom, sang ‘Nobody said it was easy… but no one ever said it would be this hard.’
I find myself, in the face of the pointlessness, remembering one of my clients. Who - as I remember it - wrote a note to stick on her fridge:
‘I’m here, so I might as well do something.’
That groundedness, in the face of everything, can sometimes bring me back.
But let’s not pretend it isn’t a tragedy, perhaps the greatest tragedy, that the world won’t turn out exactly how we wish it would.
—
This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.
Subscribe to this blog here
Read the archive here.
Buy the 12-Minute Method series of books, written 12 minutes a week over three years, here.